How Business Processes, Workflows, and Bots Work Together

This topic walks through how to collect information in a form, and then use a workflow to kick off a bot that will insert that information into a third-party line-of-business application. For example, you could provide a client with a form to gather their data and then store that data in another application.

Here's an outline of the process:

Form captures data

  1. Create a business process.
  2. Configure the form you'll use to collect information. This is the information that you will eventually pass to the third-party application.

Workflow receives form data

  1. Create a workflow.
  2. Click on the workflow canvas, and select Allow this workflow to be started by other processes in the properties pane.
  3. Under Input/Output Parameters, click View Parameters.

  4. Under Input Parameters, click Add Input. Create an input for each form field you want to send to the workflow (and then onto the bot and the third party application.) Provide a default value for fields that might be left blank when the form is filled out.
  5. Publish the workflow.

Forms sends data to workflow

  1. Navigate back to business processes, and add a Workflow Service task to the process.
  2. Select the workflow you just created.
  3. Under Input values, click Add input values.

  4. Select the parameters you configured in the workflow. Click Update.
  5. Match the form field variables to the workflow parameters. Now when the process runs, the values from the form will be passed to workflow as input parameters.
  6. Publish the process.

Bot receives data from workflow

  1. Navigate to Bots in Process Automation.
  2. Create a new bot, and record the bot inputting sample values in the third-party application.
  3. Click the Input/Output Parameters button and create input parameters for the form field values that will be passed to the bot from workflow.

  4. Publish the bot.

Workflow passes data to the bot

  1. Return to your workflow and add an Invoke Bot activity.
  2. Select the bot you just created.
  3. Under Inputs, select the workflow input parameters that match each input for the bot.

  4. Publish the workflow.

Bot passes data to the third-party application

  1. Return to your bot.
  2. Update the bot's Write actions by replacing the sample values you wrote to the third-party application with the bot's input parameter tokens.